The Handbook of International Advertising Research

6

The State of Research on Media Planning, Buying, and Selling

Yunjae Cheong

Introduction¹

Media planning has been present as a sub-area of advertising since the beginning of advertising (Leckenby & Wedding, 1982). It has developed into a highly complicated and comprehensively competitive part of advertising. Simply speaking, media planning is the process whereby a decision maker chooses where, when, and how often to advertise with a limited budget (Donnelly, 1996; Kelly & Jugenheimer, 2004). The media planning process is increasingly formidable because of the complication of the advertising phenomenon, wide range of practical alternatives, and the economic effects of the decision (Dyer, Forman, & Mustapha, 1992). In spite of the growing number of advertising studies and accumulated advertising industry experience, it is difficult to develop a set of principles for effective media planning (Hansen, 1995; Helgesen, 1992; Johnston, 1994; Kreshel, Lancaster, & Toomey, 1985; Murray & Jenkins, 1992; Poiesz & Robben, 1994). This chapter identifies specific research streams in the academic media planning literature published in the Journal of Advertising Research, which contains the largest number of articles on media planning research studies. In the last three decades of the twentieth century, for example, the Journal of Advertising Research published on average 5.8 such articles per year (Pasadeos, Barban, Yi, & Kim, 1997).

An exploration of the existing literature also provides an understanding ...